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List Price: $19.95Amazon.com's Price: $14.96 You Save: $4.99 (25%)as of 11/22/2009 12:22 EST
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 623.8813
EAN: 9781574091700
ISBN: 1574091700
Label: Sheridan House
Manufacturer: Sheridan House
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 200
Publication Date: October 01, 2003
Publisher: Sheridan House
Studio: Sheridan House
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Editorial Review:
Product Description:
Authoritative yet accessible, The Physics of Sailing Explained is the perfect work for those sailors who want to enhance their understanding and enjoyment of life at sea. It will enable readers to better grasp how sails, keels, and hulls work together to keep seafarers afloat, and will sharpen their skills with a more subtle and thorough appreciation of why various boat design features are present and why certain tactics work in certain situations. Anderson, a professor of physics at Kent State University and an avid sailor, outlines the science behind seagoing in such a way that anyone can understand and benefit from without having to trudge through a physics text or become a naval architect. With the help of this invaluable book, sailors will be better prepared to handle any situations that might arise on the water.
Topics covered include:
What limits the speed of a sailboat and what is hull speed ?
Can a sailboat ever go faster than its hull speed?
What is the best shape for a sailboat?
Can anything be done to reduce the friction of a sailboat moving through water?
What is the effect of turbulence created by a sailboat on how it moves through water and what can be done to reduce turbulence?
Why is a keel necessary on a sailboat?
How does a keel work?
How has keel design improved over the years?
How do sails work?
What is the fastest direction of sailing with respect to the wind direction?
Is it true that some sailboats can sail faster upwind than downwind?
Why are modern sails so tall and narrow for upwind sailing and much fuller for downwind sailing?
What produces the tides?
Why are there two high tides each day?
Do the tides follow the Moon around each day?
What produces the winds?
What causes the global wind patterns?
What is the Coriolis force and how does it affect global wind patterns?
What causes the global current patterns?
Why does the Gulf Stream exist?
And much more...
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
I have raced sailboats and now teach a course on game math and dynamics. The Physics of Sailing Explained has been an extremely good source of material on the dynamics of sailboats. The sections on the keel as a symmetic wing and airflow for two-sail combinations (sloops) are especially good.
Rating:  -
The book is advertized as the book explaining the physics of sailing. The book has a promising start while deriving the hull speed formula over several pages. But that's unfortunately about it. The book is really shallow on actual science of sailing. The book is only a 150 pages on a large font, you'll read it in a day.
The book makes also oversimplification of the phenomena involved. Eg it describes the sail with the grade school anecdote 'air travels a longer distance leeward to ... Read More
Rating:  -
This is a unique book somewhat bridging the qualitative and quantitative.
Organization is good, starting with the hull, then keel, sails and lastly weather. My fellow sailors snuck it away when they could, and I think we did learn some things.
Good was the hull speed derivation and shallow water wave speed derivation, and the discussions of scaling factors for the other technical parameters. Disappointing was that there were no other derivations and also that some of the ... Read More
Rating:  -
This is better read at your desk with a pad and paper nearby. There are a few areas where you will need to run a few math problems to really 'get' this book. This is more of a college upper classman read than a warm winter night read.
Once past the math and the tougher parts, you might start to look for more subjects like blocks and running rigging and the physics involved with them. Additionally, I'd like to see more about the why of some of the design trade offs in some of the faster racing ... Read More
Rating: -
The book doesn't go into alot of detail, but for the novice sailor it's more than sufficient for a good starting point.
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